A whole village could be yours . . . as long as you don’t mind snakes
No one cares less what the world thinks than a Frenchman who has dined well. Frederic Coustols, 77, the squire of the 12th-century walled town of Castelnau des Fieumarcon, south of Bordeaux, plainly couldn’t give a stuff.
He chatted on Help! We Bought A Village (C4), recalling how he discovered a cluster of ruined buildings in the 1970s and set about buying them from their 99 different owners, before embarking on a restoration that took half a lifetime.
In his left hand smouldered a hefty cigar, so pungent that the camera lens was turning opaque with soot. Later, apparently well lubricated by a glass or two of excellent red, Frederic talked some more with a scarlet scarf tied round his head in the style of an open-top turban. He looked and sounded like a Gallic Keith Richards.
His village runs as a venue for weddings, business retreats and the like. This weekend, though, it was closed to all but 33 of Frederic’s closest friends.
To throw a party in your own walled town sounds like a fantasy even for oligarchs. But this series, running every afternoon this week, reveals it can be surprisingly affordable.
The voiceover assured us that in normandy ‘properties are two a penny’. That isn’t quite true, but landscape gardeners Paul and Yip from Kent purchased a cottage with no mod cons in April 2021 for 12,000 euros.
Around their new home in La Busliere were five more cottages, a couple of barns, a cowshed and a bakery, all open to the elements and buried under brambles.
The chaps, both aged 47, scooped the lot for another 14,000 euros. There’s no electricity, and the cubbyhole for the stopcock is home to a snake and a salamander, but Paul and Yip weren’t bothered. They’d been living in a converted horsebox. Anywhere is luxury after that.
A more conventional story was unfolding in the Italian Alps outside Turin, where British couple Francesca and Carl had bought a holiday home years ago for £55,000.
now they are gradually purchasing the houses around them, planning to create a holiday village.
Channel 4 has a knack for borrowing and combining the best elements from its own shows, and this one is a mixture of escape To The Chateau and Remarkable Renovations. It’s uncomplicated — there are no rows, no deadlines, no disasters. not that you miss them — the fantasy of having a whole village to yourself is more than enough.
River (BBC4), a sumptuous visual celebration of the world’s waterways, might have been better if it hadn’t been complicated by actor Willem Dafoe’s sententious narration. The high-definition photography and astonishing aerial shots were mesmerising.
But the turgid, pretentious script, crammed with platitudes about the sacredness of rivers, was a constant distraction.
‘Rivers are the givers of human dreams,’ intoned Dafoe, ‘essential for emotional and spiritual sustenance, essential for survival.’ Some of the factual claims seemed spurious, and were not substantiated. The world’s dams, he said, held back so much water that ‘they have slowed the rotation of the earth’.
But the rich tapestry of the pictures made up for all this. Thousands of burning candles floated in a crowd at an Indian funeral, a tanker loaded with multi-coloured containers chugged upstream while a steam train puffed over an endless bridge, Buddhist monks sat in a canoe like orange peas in an open pod, the camera soared and twisted through ice caves . . .
This was one to watch after a long French-style dinner — with the sound off.